We just published a report explaining all the risks inherent in the use of social media and presenting best practice tools and techniques to manage those risks effectively.

Social media is one of the top three concerns for enterprises in 2012, according to our recent Forrsights Security Survey, and it’s easy to see why: Malware, social account hijacking, data leakage, HR concerns, regulatory compliance — these are just some of the most frequently cited challenges. And with new social media gaffes coming up all the time, like KitchenAid’s offensive tweet during one of the US presidential debates, American Apparel’s Hurricane Sandy Sale, and news of Twitter user accounts getting hacked recently (as well as LinkedIn accounts earlier this year), companies have good reason to worry about their workforce having free, unrestricted access to social networks.

Here’s the problem: You can’t stop it. Sure, you can institute a zero-use policy and completely forbid your workforce from using social media at your company, but we found this is an impractical and ineffective solution.

It is with great pleasure that I announce the completion of my first Forrester Wave™: Email Content Security, Q4 2012. I’d like to thank the research associates (Jessica McKee and Kelley Mak) who assisted me with this project. We performed a 47-criteria evaluation of nine email content security vendors. Given my background as a practitioner and solutions engineer, one of the key requirements to participate was unsupervised access to a demo environment. I had access to the environments throughout the evaluation process and found them to be a great option for validating features and “getting to know” the user interfaces. Here are some of the key findings:

Email security is a critical component of your portfolio

Email is a key component of business processes within enterprises and must be secured. Despite the fact that email security is low on the spending priority list, it’s critical that organizations safeguard email. Email is a popular attack vector for targeted attacks, and HIPAA and PCI mandate that emails containing confidential data be secured.

Advanced capabilities differentiate vendor offerings

Vendors are delivering enhanced capabilities in response to the threat and compliance landscape. Big data analytics are leveraged to combat targeted attacks. Encryption capabilities have been improved and simplified. Channel DLP is now robust and feature-rich.

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A little while ago I bumped into a journalist friend at a trade conference. We chatted about the event to try and identify hot topics and trends from our discussions and supplier meetings, and both sat there deflated when the stories that came to the surface were the same old ones of fear-mongering around APT and “cyber” threats.

“CISOs have a habit of missing the boat,” I said, thinking of how virtualization, social media, and consumerization had all crept into wide-scale adoption before many security teams had managed to turn their attention to them, “so, what topic should we be looking ahead to that CISOs are not talking about?” This question was much more interesting and we came to realize that the elephant that is currently pushing its way into the room is the Internet of Things (IoT).

My friend pointed out that he had raised this topic with several CISOs and was surprised at their lack of appreciation for the potential change that the IoT could bring to industry, consumers, and the Security & Risk (S&R) role — as the digital and physical world entwine, for example, we can envisage huge safety risks that the CISO would be best placed to address. We also decided that the stakes were surprisingly high, as the IoT has the potential to revolutionize technology innovation to such an extent that the eCommerce and social media bubbles will appear both sluggish and trivial by comparison.

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Last year the country of Japan suffered a devastating disaster of unspeakable proportions. A massive earthquake on the eastern coast of the country triggered a deadly tsunami that caused the flooding of the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Three dominos fell at once, resulting in a significant and tragic loss of life and property. I visited Japan earlier this year. As I traveled throughout the Tokyo area, I couldn’t see any evidence of these disasters. I asked several residents of the city and all told me that the earthquake did not affect the rest of Japan very much. They all discussed how ready Japan was for earthquakes, having suffered many over the centuries. It was in Tokyo that I learned that not many people actually died as the result of the earthquake. Most of the deaths were the result of drowning in the flood waters created by the tsunami. Over and over again, the people I met wanted to talk about how well their buildings were designed to resist the destructive force of earthquakes.

In 2003 a much smaller earthquake struck Iran. Measuring 6.6 on the Richter scale, the Bam earthquake had much less energy but was more destructive than the 2011 Japanese earthquake, which had a magnitude of 9.0. (Data provided by United States Geological Survey.)

Take a second to think back to the year 2009. The US was in the thick of the financial crisis; companies were slashing budgets, and the unemployment rate was in double-digits. And do you remember a little thing called the “swine flu”? The World Health Organization (WHO) deemed the H1N1 strain of the swine flu influenza a global pandemic in June 2009. These were just some of the events top of mind for much of the nation and the broader global community three years ago.

2009 was also the year that the annual Forrester And Disaster Recovery Journal (DRJ) Survey focused on the role of risk management in business technology (BT) resiliency and crisis communications programs. Needless to say, the survey was fairly timely. Forrester found risk management was becoming a more common practice for business continuity teams, but that there was still more room for further collaboration with their risk management counterparts.

Fast forward three years, and the 2012 Forrester/DRJ survey is again focusing on the role of risk management in BT resiliency and crisis communications (you can take the 2012 survey by clicking here). A lot has changed since 2009 with a number of new events, technologies, and organizational challenges currently plaguing business continuity and risk management professionals.